First is a Beomaster 1900 Type 2904 receiver. The 1900 was a very popular receiver for Bang & Olufsen and was produced from 1976 to 1982. I remember seeing them in the local audio shop (I'm dating myself) and was impressed by their modern touch buttons. That was quite something back then. Of course that went along with the super low profile, sleak Jacob Jensen design. A really nice design that held up with time. It is not surprising that so many owners still want them working today. However, at over forty years old some restoration is required.
That is what the task is with this one. This Beomaster 1900 is in decent physical shape. It needs a little cleaning and polishing. The rosewood veneer trim has some places where it is coming loose. I will have to be careful with those and see if I can save it.
Looking at the bottom side of the Beomaster I see that all four rubber feet are missing. It looks like Martin Olsen is carrying remanufactured replacements for those so I will be placing an order for those.
Fortunately the rattle was just from pieces of the broken feet. The rubber material is quite deteriorated.
Peeling back the rest of the Beomaster 1900 first layer showed nothing to indicate there are any major problems. I was glad to see that the plastic masks for the bass, treble and balance indicators all look good on this unit. The previous Beomaster 1900 I restored was a Type 2903 and the indicator masks had started to deteriorate from the heat of the illuminating lamps. I have printed replacement masks but those won't be needed on this unit.
Quite a nice unit. Definitely worth getting back to working order.
I will continue to disassembly the Beomaster so I can clean and get to all of the electrolytic capacitors that will be replaced. I will change out the lamps. The volume indicators and FM tuning indicators will get new incandescent lamps as their properties play into the circuit function. The bass, treble, balance and source selection indicators will be switched to LED replacements.
The bass, treble and balance slide pots will be cleaned and lubricated. A common failure in these receivers are the plastic mounts for the slide control contacts so I will check that those are good. If not I have Martin's repair kit for them.
I thought I would comment on the repair of the rosewood front panel I recently did. After doing a full re-cap and slider repair, my aged 1900 was singing like new,however, the front panel veneer was chipped and a few bits were missing. I decided to replace it, but (the original and decidedly red colored)Asian rosewood is now endangered and totally unavailable. I was able to locate Brazilian rosewood veneer, but it is decidedly brown and did not match the side panels. Determined to make this work, and armed with 4 veneer strips, I tried various things to color match. I settled (believe me or not)on using a red permanent Magic Marker on the brown veneer followed by a quick wipe of Minwax red mahogany stain. The result was a very close match. The next challenge was to strip and attach the new veneer to the plastic front panel. This required a wooden jig that could tightly clamp the veneer to the panel (which has molded-in clips on the back and required the backing park of the jig to have holes cut out for this). I glued it together with clear Gorilla glue and clamped it for 24 hours.
ReplyDeleteI did the wood restore on my unit by removing the old rosewood and replacing it with 2"inch pressure sensitive real wood veneer that I trimmed to match the plastic sides and front.
ReplyDeletecheck out
https://www.vandykes.com/psa-veneer-edge-banding-2-x-8/p/200555/s/02012513/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=ppc_google_pla&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIovfix5f_6AIVDZyzCh0nMQw1EAQYASABEgItcvD_BwE